Looking Glass
by goldenmeadow
Summary: The soul takes flight to the world that is invisible and thereupon arriving she is sure of bliss and forever dwells in paradise.' Heartbreaking, blissful beauty unfolds around Edward’s dilemma, Bella’s dream, and their destiny. Love vs. time. AU/canon. M
1. Mirror

**Viola Cornuta**, darling, you hold my heart in your hands and my soul within your body.

Disclaimer: Although this perhaps should have been, it was not. So SM owns the original, while I stake claim to this.

~~This is my Christmas gift to my lovelies who've allowed me the pleasure of writing. To those of you who've born me aloft with words so much more poetic than mine. To Jenn, Gillian, Ape, Amanda, Diane, Jo, Robin (x2), Kitty, Tosh, Lix and Mister, Char, Kassiah, V, Kari, Mer, Margie, Katie, Claudia, Tracey, Annette, Rae, Kyrene, Christie, my-crooked-smile, LBelle, EdwardsKitten, susay, Tori, readerkitty …this is something I'd never have considered without your limitless love and hugs. This baby won my wee profile poll. Thus, with all my heart and a year full of thanks and gratefulness, Mirror~~

**Please, listen to: _Be Here Now_, Ray LaMontagne: **www(DOT)youtube(DOT)com(SLASH)watch?v=Vl3V0dTRDvI

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**Mirror**

**Forks, WA**

**Edward**

We'd returned to the one place that was the embodiment of home. Our small cottage in the meadow where I had initially shown Bella my glistening gem-like skin on a day that would either have meant her untimely demise, or the beginning of her understanding of what I really was. The earthly, ethereal pull between us was a force I was too anxious, too starving for her blood, at that point, to recognize as prophetic. Then, I was always one half second away from sticking my incisors in a stippling pattern against her béchamel neck. That I staved off the savage impulse was a testament to our enchantment even in our foundling days when I stumbled over words, wanting to touch, aching to taste. Gauche, juvenile, lethal.

Each time I met her, I died a bit. And was reborn one molecule of graciousness at a time. Sitting too close to her in the field that was an ocean of spring blossoms shifting like capped waves to the waft of air teasing up Bella's flighty Chesapeake hair and smelting out the chaotic scent of her blood that incinerated my insides, I allowed her to touch me. With reverence, not shyness or clumsiness, her hand trembled. The first sweep over my forearm and up to the slightest gap of skin hollowing my throat caused my eyes to close. Better than the brush of the warm sun when I stood alone, unclothed, on sunny days such as this, here in same spot.

The intonation of her capering stroke hushed me with what felt like it could be…love? And filled my mouth with the rush of tangy poison, a taste of what could become murder.

It felt divine. It made me sinister.

She was so right. And all wrong. The duality of _us_: me wanting to damage and throttle and drink; love, last, protect! Bella, a mixture of bashful and strong, old and wise and an ingénue, closed off from me through her impermeable thoughts yet opening her soul through words she didn't want to speak, and the most soulful brown eyes that played out all of her emotions like writ word to paper.

She gasped, not at the iciness, nor at the flickering luminescence, but at the rightness of it all. _And she called me beautiful._

Not scared, undaunted, Bella had no idea how close she was to dying! My hands could caress. Long, tapered talented fingers doubled as weapons and could just as easily slide through her buttery skin to squash her to a pulpy mess of heaving frothy liquid.

I was pulled inside-out. Right-side-in. I tucked there. _In_, attempting to be right, righteous, wanting her to be my salvation rather than the nail to my revolting coffin.

Pulling back, placing her sun-hewn hands palms down to the ground and away from my flesh that rippled like a human man's beneath her wash, I sat back, crouching on my heels. One step away from predatory stance because it was too fucking good, too much curled up inside me and I could not dissect the need for corporeal affection from the yearning to quash her heart in my fist!

Because her scent drove me wild, her blood the most celestial ambrosia that forged a divining rod of my body, I leaned closer again. Midday sun lengthened the shadow I stole across her wide-open face. Looming closer, I noted her eyes dilating, the scaling up of her breaths, the twitch of her blousy mouth that opened a scant bit. So beautiful. I wanted to bite her.

I wanted to be able to love her.

What warped instinct propelled Bella to thrust herself upon me, to close the gap between our upright bodies, to drape herself like the warmest linen over me while my eyes blackened, my teeth whettened, my neck straining to the side and away from her when all I wanted to do was lunge down and take her, I would never know!

The rosebuds of her lips crept closer, the veins in her milky skin traced faster like highways, a racing torrent. A quick torment. Fingers lifted and I detailed the pale half moons of her nails, every second stopped from the shutter of a camera. _Flash. _Life? _Flash. _Death.

A sickening replay of _He loves me, he loves me not._ Worse: _Will he kill me, will he not._

This was no mere child's game!

I never believed Bella did not understand the exact measure of menace she put herself into that day. The proportion of my growing affection she vastly overrated to the lapsed cruel hunger for what I could only describe as the best concoction of heroin to a diehard junkie.

She was _never_ safe, not that day.

A hairsbreadth away from my mouth that had sneered back like a lion's ready to pounce, one fleeting though cosseted Bella: _I was alive still because I was meant to meet her._

Not to kill her. Not to eat from her. But to love her.

And she would live, because this crash between us, a hot glacial overlapping thing, was bigger than my appetite. _Most of the time._

Brutally intact, I could either slice her to hash or fly away from her. Hell had no pain on this decision that I mulled over, minutely to the human eye. Hands clenched, jaw a thing of distaste, foully wrenching each reaching muscle one at a time away from her succulent pursed mouth that I could as soon kiss as devour, I ran to the treeline. I fucking flew up the mountain, ingested deep breaths of bracingly clean Bella-free air, caught it in my torso, held my breath, and sped back.

Dawdling, delaying, denying another pulse of inhalation, one more close encounter, I teased and cajoled at my most fatal from the perimeter of the wood. _I could love you, kill you, eat you, leave you for dead. I could live with you forever, make you mine, treasure you, pleasure you, and still touch you._

I _wanted_ to alarm Bella!

Breathy spatters of scant fright flowed to me, my position shifting so as not to be engulfed by her presence fully. A devious thing, I gallivanted from tree bow to center meadow to the far end and back to the trees.

_You should run screaming, shout to the hills! Never to return._

I slowed. Optimistic that she understood her vitality made me virile and villainous all at once, I took in Bella-tainted air in small bits. A little more, the closer I came.

My reasoning was flawed. She did not flinch, her brow didn't even furrow! Holding her hand out in acceptance of the creature I was, Bella welcomed me back!

I fell. Never to be lifted up again.

Flayed open, guts spilling, heart trying to beat, I clasped her hand.

Laid bare, all of my barren waste, I just wanted the simplicity of her chaste embrace.

Her fragrant blood suddenly had nothing on her touch.

_I_ was the lamb to the slaughter.

She could have been no one else's. I was only meant to live, to linger through a century of goring disease and boredom and minutiae, to be Bella's.

Exact and undeniable and true.

We bartered a truce. And it was never easy, in those first years.

On the precipice of death, at my hands or those of my Jasper, _once_, or my rivals of warring factions and vampire royalty, Bella's life swung from a noose, just this side of suffocation.

Many times I thought I could not save her. Once I left her.

The remembrance of those months was something I would never recount. Scurrilous hate and hurt and agony. Mine and hers. _I would never go there again._

I could have killed Bella, a thousand-fold instances in rapacious very detailed ways.

_I could have killed her._

But I never did.

_I. Never. Did._

I never did.

I wavered but would not capitulate.

I glared death in the eye, and pounded it back.

Bella fueled me. Took away my fear. Replenished me. Made me mightier, more wholesome.

Beget passion in the place of blood lust.

At first she begged. Pleaded, with Alice her cheerleader, for me to make her a soulless monster.

Through most of Bella's twenties, unreal love was swirled up into a hurricane of hurtful emotions at my refusal; tension, anger, full throaty fury fouling up into heated fights.

Within this tempest one tether kept us strong. Our bond to each other had caused me to cross time, to become undead, to make her acquaintance and make her mine in the only way I would.

As my lover.

We married. Simply wed, we made love as if for the first time.

Resplendent ferocity and crush of flesh. Archaically bound to my wife, I adulated Bella with my body as I had with my _beat-still-beat-hush_ heart. Soft and slow, hard and fast, I did not have to overpower instinct, as Bella controlled me blissfully, erotically.

Sensuality, sexually, scintillatingly, we were coiled to each other in one more manner.

That no man, or beast, could sunder.

It felt like Bella's desire alone to become a vampire would hasten her away from me nonetheless.

It pained me most horrifically to deny Bella this thing she was so dead-set on, but my resolve never flagged, not even when I was threatened with the gutting brutal idea that we may never make it beyond this loggerhead.

Thus, Bella's first birthdays as my wife were more like funereal marches with her moping in bereavement for another year passing while the rest of us wanted to celebrate. Inwardly, I rejoiced! A woman, a human, my mate, she would breathe! Outwardly, I demonstrated my bliss**, **caving to every bone shattering cataclysmic carnal craving; my flesh and hers conjoined as echoes of ecstasy reverberated like chorales.

This fractious idea of me changing Bella instead of her getting older whilst I remained like a statue that not even the elements could bite was a splinter embedded in the soft tissue of her soul. Slowly, excruciatingly slowly, that shard worked its way to the surface and flittered away like the downy fluff from a cattail on an autumnal breeze.

By her twentieth annum with me, a strange thing happened. Colliding hotly, my untouched love founds its true match inside of Bella, and she changed. Into a woman. One who was finally complete within her own skin. Revolutions of the sun had wrought our evolving emotion into such a thing, an infinite whorl circling the vast cosmos and finally, we grew together! Learned and loved. Loved and succored each other fruitfully.

And age did not fucking matter.

I would always be older than Bella. And she would be the one of us that changed through the passage of our scribbling lives that became a manifesto to the intensity of our connection. Ultimately that was an eventuality Bella accepted.

I was going nowhere.

Never.

This enormous respite, this earth-shattering tongue-tied web laughed at the universe, made an untouchable fine veil around us. Shielding us, just as Bella's mind preternaturally protected her.

Over and over, I thanked the immortals, the higher beings, the ones who had put this profound plan into action.

We moved on. Splendid and luxurious and _living._ Travel and study and work and through it all, family.

In the end it didn't matter that people stared, talked or whispered. We never pretended to be mother and son or grandmother and grandson. We were each other's first, last, _forever_. Majestic and powerful, there was appreciation for the masterpiece of the way we moved together from those who truly beheld us.

Blessed by the only good thing Renee had ever bestowed upon Bella, she had flourished from shy and self-aware to stately and elegant and assured. Ever more stunning! I never longed for our early days, as each dawn there was a new slightly altered Bella to watch, caress, listen to. Her body as well as her mind transformed. No longer a titmouse, Bella matured. As she never would have, had I halted her growth with my toxin.

The way her skin changed through her ages, a flawless beauty whose surface aesthetically met the tick tock of years that marked their path in little sprinkles of tiny lines bespeaking of laugh, love, all the hours we spent together.

_That_ was divinity.

And she made me into a man.

Now, settled into our little abode that we had fashioned ourselves, housing our scant worldly goods – we had nearly everything we needed in each other alone – we sat wrapped around each other in our bedroom. This haven was our touchstone. And this was where we would begin again.

Through the years, Alice had systematically excised all her future visions of Bella from playing into her mind. Fully realizing this day would come, we did not want to know when.

Bella sat on the plush peony pink bench before the antique cherry vanity, facing the mottled mirror and smiling at me in reflection as I held her against my body, brushing out her locks that were still full, crackling with static electricity. All wavy and lush and the same but for the sterling white of the strands.

The cadence of her heart, my swelling sanctuary, had begun to slow.

Charlie was gone. Renee, Phil, laid to rest. Our high school friends scattered.

All that was of import was right here in my arms.

The rest of our family, Rosalie and Emmett, Alice and Jasper, Esme and Carlisle, and now Peter and Charlotte were close by. In the same white Victorian house that could only be found if you knew where to look, at the end of a mile-long alley of giant feathery oaks.

They'd said their goodbye's already.

We reminisced. Kissed softly. Stroked devotedly. Had I known then, I would not have squandered time. It slipped by so fast, in comparison to the decades that had bored me….before Bella.

We regretted nothing.

We had succeeded in the unthinkable. We had grown old together.

I may not have aged, on the surface, but I had learned so much more, in my heart.

Within me, within Bella.

Even now, she did not wilt. She blossomed!

Her time was my time. I had met each year with a new creak to my knees, a crick to my neck, as if I were mortal.

The one thing that didn't ebb was our passion.

"I'm dying now, Edward," Bella's lips like full peaches halved over my own to whisper simply.

"I know love," I held her closer, tighter than ever before, tangling my fingers into her tresses, turning my mouth to her neck and feeling the filaments of seconds trespassing. "I am too. I'll be right behind you."

I was ready.

Done.

About to begin again.

Full.

Filled.

All our earthly love would now find a home in the hinterlands beyond.

Love.

_Love._

_Love._

_I love you._

_I love you._

_I am following._

_A lamb._

_To pasture._

_With you, Bella._

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**~~Happy Holidays~~**

**There's one more chapter, it is breathless,. I'll post on the end of 2009****.**

**Rie~**


	2. Vivid

**Viola**, how can I thank you? For this alone, you provided Longfellow with ease, which was no small feat. Much love and huge kisses to you!

**Disclaimer: **Twilight and all that other stuff belongs to Miss SM. This little story and twist on the tale is mine.

~~I'd really like it if you listened to Death Cab's _Bixby Canyon Bridge_ while you read this. http://www(DOT)youtube(DOT)com(FORWARD SLASH)watch?v=4St1fiq2F8I~~

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**Vivid**

**Circa 2066**

**Forks, Washington**

**Edward**

It was the opposite of vivid, the way Bella's corporeal body burned out, sizzling like the flame of a candle between two moist fingertips. Her incandescent soul remained faintly, flickering wisps of smoke from an extinguished wick.

I would follow Bella, leave this earth, traipse across blacked out space that was the immediate stopping of existence before I found her, from icy-cold death to sun-filled meeting.

I carried her to our bed, holding her tenderly one last time before arranging her arms, her legs, smoothing out her hair just so. Though I still observed her body with the keen eyes of a husband, the dearth of Bella within it was obscenely distressing. Even having prepared for this moment, her utter lack of existence made a fallen man of me!

Racked by pain that had no tangible beginning or end, eaten by the resurgence of guilt that I could have stopped this all, ceased her aging, thrown a blow to her ever dying just by turning Bella into vampire!

Gagging at the thought, I sobbed tearlessly into my hands, in danger of digging my fingers through the compressed caverns of my cheeks. My open mouth made a scream, but no sound emerged. Instead it sat huge like penance in my throat, a thing I attempted to retch out.

I remembered the fine crosshatch of skin at the nape of her neck, and the way she hummed when I stroked her there in passing. My head fell to her soft belly. It met me with resistance. Rigor was setting in. Rotting would be fast on its heels. "Oh God, Bella! What did I do?" I cried into the nothing air, an atmosphere devoid of my lover. I'd never felt so completely alone, not even upon waking, without my mother and father, as a bloodthirsty ghoul.

Night, then morning, then noon. Another dusk, dawn, midday. I never moved from my resting place, and wished I could die just where I was.

Devastated.

She was gone. For two days, Bella had egressed.

It was too long, far too fucking long.

I had one task to take care of before I went to her.

At the edge of the meadow, we'd cleared a large square of earth, razed it, planted it up with perennials, shrubs and fledgling trees. It was here I buried Bella. Amidst blooming flowers and leafy pines, I lowered her casket into the ground. Inside, she slept. On her hand were my mother's ring and her wedding band. She was otherwise unadorned. With one last look at her face, peaceful in repose, I had closed the lid with the gentlest touch after I pressed my lips to hers.

Now she was cold as me.

Sweeping my hand upon the hard wood of the box, I said one more goodbye to that body I had adored, but not to her spirit.

Endeavoring to be strong, I lifted her down into the hole.

Topside, I clawed soil, shredded petals, tore at the grass. This small ceremony of me and her was nearly worse than the moment I had felt her heart still. Bleak and broken, I found my voice and put words to the lullaby I'd composed for Bella so very long ago, as I'd promised her.

But my faith faltered. I was neither as courageous nor as durable as I'd believed.

Until I read the epitaph on her gravestone from my hunched over position above the open grave.

_**Bright was her face with smiles, and words of welcome and gladness fell from her beautiful lips, and blessed the cup as she gave it.**_

Standing on shaking legs, I leant over to lay a pristine, perfumed trumpet lily sideways across her coffin, watching the pollen mote out. Rising, I picked the small leather satchel from my trouser pocket. Unloosing the clinched sinew, I shook the contents into my palm. From my grasp I watched the golden grains rain down over the dark polished wood. Gold dust sprinkled over her, merging with the ochre giftof the lily, making the whole thing shimmer.

Hours later, maybe it was days, I finally left her graveside.

Bella's body was beneath the strata of loam, but her being was waiting for me.

As were Emmett and Jasper.

Emmett knew what to do with my ashen pile; scatter it far and wide so the cinders could never commingle again. But for my chest, steel-like skin and unshatterable bones that held space for my heart. The heart that belonged to Bella though it had never known rhythm in her presence. _Those particles_ were to be locked tight in a coffin of the same build and size as Bella's.

When choosing our inscriptions, Bella mine and me hers, it was so simple. There was no other choice, there never was…_with us_.

Seated next to her headstone, mine would read:

_**He was a valiant youth, and his face**_**, **_**like the face of the **__**morning, gladdened the earth with its light, and ripened through into action.**_

I had told them not to come to me, having bid them goodbye at Bella's bedside. Carlisle, Esme. Alice and Rosalie. Peter and Charlotte. I could cope with no more grief, no more silent keening. Everything that needed to be said, had been…for near-on two hundred years. Bella and I had held hands that day of their leaving us to our final solitude. Our solidarity a staunch thing. Now a master at my mind reading ability, I shut out thoughts, focused on words alone. Resigned, the gathered no longer opined. But the mourning would not be denied. Less than speeches, more caresses and loving touches, we each sought a degree of closure that left such a gaping wide hole in the fabric of our family I wondered if it would ever heal.

Yet I had to believe it would.

Their agony was clear. Turning over their faces, plowing up their eyes, tilling their lips into craven facsimiles of smiles. Trying not to bereave before time. Bella graciously, lovingly, accepted each word and hug and lingering stroke upon her magisterially aged flesh. All the while, she alone of all of us had tears of warm salt tracking down her face, dampening the collar of her shirt, wetting my hand as I clasped her to me over her collar bone.

Sister, daughter; brother, son.

_I could have stopped this._

"You would never have loved me any other way, Edward," Bella had silenced me, as if inhabiting my head, as husbands and wives were prone to do after so much time together.

Firm and bold and still strong and vibrant, she clasped my cheeks while I feared for the papery porcelain skin of her palms on my perma-flesh, "We _will_ see them hence."

I nodded an affirmation that found justice over her lips, "I will find _you_ again."

As a family, we would congregate. Eventually. In a millennia or two. Of that I was certain…we did have souls, otherwise I would never have let Bella live, and die, as a mortal woman. I had to trust that now.

Unable to do this thing by myself, I turned to euthanasia by vampire. Only by my brothers' hands. Emmett and Jasper were strong enough to kill me, men enough to allow me this, and filled with such complete filial devotion that though they would scream and cry non-tears like a crocodile, they would not fail me.

I needed them to understand this was not the end.

With new resilience, a racing of anticipation, a weird current tensed my thighs…she was so close!

They waited in Bella's and my bedroom. I would die where she had. Dirty from my toil, I showered one last time.

Cleaned and ready, clear-eyed and craving finality, I joined them.

There were no more words I could utter but this, "I owe you." Looking each in the eye as I embraced them, weighty sobriety dimmed my giddiness at seeing Bella again. A small half-smile was upon my lips, quivering and unformed until I thought of my wife.

Filling out, my smile widened my mouth, our eternity was so close!

"I'm ready," I nodded to my brothers, trying to ignore the hesitation of their movements.

"I love you."

Those were my final words.

Neither of them spoke as they set about the gruesome work of dismembering me so I could return to my one love; with their faces harrowed, hearts bleeding, eyes sobbing dryly, hands clenched into talons that tore me apart.

I swallowed my screams, followed the peaceful sleepy hypnosis Jasper arched over the room, enclosing us three in an umbrella of death and tranquility so at odds with my maiming at their hands.

It was true what they said. Not the tunnel vision and blinding white light. But the _shutter-flash-shutter_ of a life in reverse through a 35MM lens. It was not my years I watched, but Bella's. Every little thing, each nuance and laugh, every angered moment, years of walking, talking, reading, eating, hand holding. Days and nights and decades of love making, fucking, the titillating moments of _le petit mort_ taking me to my own demise.

A seamless shift from there to here.

The pronounced silence was…_astounding._

Where was she?

_Oh God! Where was Bella?_

Instant terror horrified me more than my own death! Was this simply more Purgatory? I'd hoped to easily come to her, believed too readily. Dashed to my knees with crushing misery, I sank in upon myself.

Bereft, estranged, it took something akin to the growling wash of minutes for me to understand this fatality was so final it took me back to where I had been when I was truly seventeen. In the hospital ward, infirm with influenza. That day when I should have died completely but was instead made a living monument to the boy I had been.

So I could meet the love of my infinity almost nine decades later.

Foreign wetness sprang to my eyes as I gulped deep breaths down into my chest that filled fully with oxygen. The film of tears I had forgotten the feel of momentarily blinded me, until the slick fat drops spilled out and over my cheeks and into my mouth, and I tasted saltiness that was vaguely familiar, if I reached down far enough.

This liquid was saline and saliva. Not venom.

This pounding was my heart. Not a desiccated organ.

This warmth, spreading, coursing, speeding, escalating was my blood. Not the empty filthy veins of yore.

Ultimate ending had given me human body.

I inhaled and shook and tried to stand upon weakened legs but was pressed back down by a body blanketing my back.

_Oh, thank you, Thank You! _

She was here!

Grazing her hand up my shoulder, over my neck, stroking my Adam's apple that shunted with my weeping, Bella's fingers on me were no longer incinerating. Her hand held power, and I felt her fingertips dent my skin whereas before they had bounced off.

"Edward," she gasped, stealing forward to settle in my lap, "You're blushing!"

My face heated again, and I ducked into her hair, her neck, her flesh that never again would be such an obstacle to my twinned lusts.

Her voice was undeveloped as her body that rocked upon me, with me, in commune. This was not the beloved woman I had interred, but Bella of old! Returned to her eighteenth year, she was spring, flowers, bare feet and summer sunshine! Not the honeyed, majestic, queenly woman I had just let go.

Clear and ringing, gauzy and hazy, Bella bloomed in my arms when I reclined away to stare in amazement, meeting her equally incredulous look.

Oh so fucking clear and real and now!

"You're a man!" She laughed brilliantly, and that pure sound made the curtain of time that veiled us flutter out and then settle back again over us.

Our lips were starving between words. _Your eyes are ivy. Your skin is the same as mine. Where have you been? How long did it take me? It doesn't matter, an eternity is but a blink of the eye, I always felt you close. _

_You glow._

_You have blood inside of you._

_You're an angel._

_I missed you._

_I missed you._

_We're the same._

I shifted slowly and dragged Bella across me.

_This isn't the same._

Gasps and clutching and clothing disintegrated and never even existed.

_No, it's not._

_I can't hurt you._

_You never did._

The hemisphere of her near womanly lips made a smile over my own young man's mouth. Of innocence and knowledge, virtuous as the young lady I had courted against my will, artless as the woman I'd been blessed to know for more time than I was owed.

Restlessly swelteringly, unbearably needful, Bella was on me, I was in her! My moan was just that. No hiss, growl or snarl.

Her wet and heat was unencumbered by the hint of blood. The anxiety for her tiny frame against my formidable hips, erection, and thrusts melted like the formerly arctic plains of my physique.

With arms that would not break her, and lips that could not crush or mold or form, hands that finally met resistance, I clutched Bella, grappled with her, slowly and sensually and archaically and primitively followed our deaths with a connubial rite of passage that made a mockery of anything anyone else had ever known!

Atoned, I was a man.

And we would never die again.

Her grace was not new. The swirl and swivel of slick heat over me felt insanely insatiable! God, her breasts! Our hearts both beat faster than Father Time could fathom, and I could kiss, lick, suck, pluck every bit of Bella without fear of goring her!

Most inexplicably, the reactions of my body were ten million times more potent than they'd been as a vampire.

To hold her, love her, touch her as a human…it was everything I had ever wanted, and all my imaginings held not a single sand of truth to the reality!

Stars simply extinguished. Time justly stopped. My body was human. And I had little control.

With her posterior making handfuls under my palms, I pulled Bella one more time over me, arced up into her, came as she writhed and pulsed and pounded and cried!

I held her as hard as I wanted, with no fear for bruises or broken bones and watched, languidly, the swivel of her hips rounding down and tearing up my shaft.

"Bella, I-"

She hushed me with one finger to my mouth, begging silence and no apologies, hands on my wide chest, and I fucking felt her weight! Her hair lashed me, and stung. Leaning forward, Bella dove up and down and our nipples met, held, touched and tautened, and I was about to become unglued again!

She sat straight up on my lap, on my cock. So I was far too deep inside. Hair in fists, breasts topped by pink, the rasps of my mouth littered all over her tits and hips, waist and neck, she was a work of art.

Riding me as if we'd never made love, Bella slowed. Sank. And saturated me with the most glorious groan.

I pulled her nipples to my mouth and guided her down to my chest, my shoulder. Legs locked, hips still rocked in slow motion. Sweat sat over both our bodies.

Pulling her like a cover around me, I slid our bodies together.

_My man._

_My woman. My wife._

_Husband._

_This_ was _after_ life.

Time had shed its essence

It held no meaning, not that it ever had for us. But it instead of the morbid crawl of near ninety years before Bella, in lieu of the fast tripping of the clock and calendar during my swift sixty _with_ Bella, this was a cloud, a coil, a light dusting, a fragment and its whole, a feather freed from wing floating down, _down_, dipping, down. Pushed up _up_ flying. Never to Alpha, never to Omega. Floating, but being. Untethered, but knowing. Every touch lasted forever, because there was no such thing as time. There was nothing but _now_.

In this endless stratosphere, all I saw was Bella. Every permutation of her had remained a steel-stamped image in my memory. Always starting and ending with us here. Around our love for the length of eons was every place we'd ever been. It was real and it wasn't rational; memory, existence, everything just _was._

_After life._

Youth, newness, us, the same, but primitive and civilized. Tried and true.

A time warp.

A fine walk.

A divine being, _together._

Crossing space just once I whispered to Alice, "We live yet."

_Bright was her face with smiles, and words of welcome and gladness fell from her beautiful lips, and blessed the cup as she gave it._

_He was a valiant youth, and his face__, __like the face of the__ morning, gladdened the earth with its light, and ripened through into action._

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~Thoughts? A fresh supply of Kleenex?~

This is done. Thank you so much for reading something I really never imagined anyone wanting. However, the response to it in my Challenge oneshots was enough to make me want to post it again.

Happy New Year! Be safe, be happy, do what you love.

_Bella and Edward's tombstone quotes are from Longfellow's _

_Evangeline._

_A Tale of Arcadie_

_Again, I cannot possibly thank __**Vi**__ enough for those thoughts._

If you get the chance, please vote for the Shimmers and the Twi 25 Challenge. And check out my new bitter, bitten, blighted, blissful oneshot, _Surrender._

And we may be doing some very funny _Gone With the Wind _and _Alice_ (Mel's Diner) round robins to welcome 2010. That's me and my babes. **They wrote me one for my 36****th**** birthday and it's torqued, hilarious and **_**hold onto your hotties**_** hot! Please read and review**: http://www(DOT)fanfiction(DOT)net(SLASH)s(SLASH)5621886(SLASH)1(SLASH)Happy_Birthday_Bella_Round_Robin_Collaboration or go to my faves for _Happy Birthday, Bella._


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